Arts-Based Research and a Novel about Celtic London

September 30th 2020

Susan Rowland (Professor of English and Jungian Studies): susanr183@gmail.com; susanrowland-books.com

The talk…

• ABR is a new research paradigm

• Goes back to when sciences and arts not separate. (not limited as to field)

• Technology part of arts and sciences (not assimilated to hegemony of subject/object split)

• Role of intuition, unconscious and the body in research

• ABR is Jungian with “the image” • Creative process intrinsically knowledge generating.• Can respond to interconnectivity quantum/magical universe.

• Usefully understood as 4 types: analytic or material inquiry, synthetic or synthesizing discourses, critical activist and improvisatory.

• ABR is also an investigation into language via the essential communicative, rhetorical and transformative properties of art in any media.

The novel… Murder by Sacred Well

• Researching genre by pushing to limits.

• Critical activist new kinds heroes.

• Synthesizing discourses of climate emergency, occult, religion

• Exploration of place by means material traces prehistory

• Improvisatory exploration motivation, family trauma, why violence response to personal and collective abuses.

• Researching despair.

Arts-Based Research and Paradigms

• The paradigm of the scientific method (and the subject/object split)

• The paradigm of quantitive research

• The paradigm of qualitative research

• The paradigm of Arts-Based Research: not simply qualitative because created material object open to potentially limitless re-interpretation by audiences across time and space; not subject/object split because psyche artist deeply involved, hence:

• The paradigm of Jungian Arts-Based Research: a language to examine the subjectivity involved with a “third” that is both subject and object or “Transdisciplinary”.

Arts-based Research and Jungian Psychology (1)

• Art forms are expressive, and meaning generating

• Forms are collective heritage connect to social structures

• Forms generate worlds; art has a worldview

• Psyche of meaning/form generating archetypes

• Archetypes contribute to social structures, neither determining not being determined by them

• Archetypes have synchronous properties and in individuation continually image world of being.

Basic Principles of ABR (from Handbook of Arts-Based Research, ed. Leavy 2018) and Jung (2)

• Art not machine generating answers, rather raises new or more empathetically informed questions.

• Art problematizes rather than presupposing fixed or stable reality.

• Art rejects static or absolute truths

• Psyche is relational, autonomous, independently creative.

• Role of unconscious to signal incompleteness, problematizing ego assumptions, hence not static or absolute truths

Basic Principles of ABR (from Handbook of Arts-Based Research, ed. Leavy 2018) and Jung (3)

• Art images are meaning rich yet not definitive.

• Art uses diversity describing, problem solving

• Art holistic – microcosm for macrocosm

• Art images are materialized archetypal images, never definitive because of unknown psyche

• Psyche immanent and transcendent

• Individuation making being as knowing and vice versa

Basic Principles of ABR (from Handbook of Arts-Based Research, ed. Leavy 2018) and Jung (4)

• Art evocative, can produce empathy

• Art can be critical, raise awareness, challenge stereotypes

• Art participatory and generates multiple meanings

• Archetypal images in art evoke in audience

• Jung’s psyche critical because incomplete and de-centers ego

• Archetypal images invite multiple psychic participation without end

The Artist, the Dreamer, the Researcher and the Image• The ”image” in Jungian

psychology is psychic and can be materialized in any medium.

• It is therefore the starting point for any work of art.

• ABR and Jung provide an overlapping yet not identical epistemology for research starting with the image, for example in creative writing.

• 4 types of ABR

• 1) Analytic; thinking in materials

• 2) synthetic; of discourses

• 3) critical-activist

• 4) Improvisatory

ABR and Artography

• ABR is essentially structuralist since is assumes the validation of the existing traditions of art, even if the artwork contradictions them. This is similar to notions of Jungian archetypes.

• a/r/tography is a form of poststructuralist ABR that assumes nothing and looks for liveliness and spontaneity. It is similar to Jung’s idea of visionary art when the collective unconscious pours its overwhelming energy through the artist.

The Problem with Frankenstein is technology as object…• The novel Frankenstein can be read as a feminist critique of the

science and technology of the subject/object split.

• The result of this split, the Creature’s revenge is nuclear weapons (as well as other ‘creatures’ such as social media, COVID 19 etc).

ABR to Save Frankenstein: The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico by Joel Weishaus• Art is chalice for psyche-body rejuvenation

• The subject/object split enchants us

Necessity to bring science and pre-ABR “research” into living (Jungian) ABR research.

The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico

• 4 types of ABR

• 1) Analytic; thinking in materials; An epic in a revolution in form and a treatment of language.

• 2) synthetic; of discourses; particularly those divorced in modernity around “objects”

• 3) critical-activist; showing what is at stake.

• 4) Improvisatory; letting the psyche lead the way to humanity.

Atomic Muse

• falling out: "The hair/comes out in patches. Teeth/break off like matchsticks / at the gumline but the loss/is painless...Weeks later...survivors must expel / day by day in little pisses / the membrane lining of their bladders..." (M. Kumin. From, "How to Survive a Nuclear War.")

• this museum: The National Atomic Museum was established by the Defense Nuclear Agency in 1969 to exhibit the shapes unclassified nuclear weapons. The exhibits trace the evolution of nuclear weapons from the early 1940s on. Located on Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, the facility was transferred to the Department of Energy in 1976.

• Urania: Perhaps the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Urania is one of the nine muses. Her symbol is the globe and a pair of compasses. She is the muse of astronomy and poetry’s measured lines.

• Kali: The Hindu goddess who is "Cosmic Power, the totality of the universe, the harmonization of all the pairs of opposites, combining wonderfully the terror of absolute destruction with an impersonal motherly reassurance." (Campbell 2008: 95)

• clouds of blood: "It is ghastly now to look around when blood-red clouds are gathering in the sky. The air is being dyed with the blood of men while the maidens of battle are singing." (Onians 1951: 356)

• BOMARC: CIM-10 Bo(eing) M(ichigan) A(eronautical) R(esearch) C(enter). This was a cruise, or pilotless, fighter, built primarily to intercept bombers. The Bomarc saw service from 1960 until 1972. On 7 June 1960, at McGuire AFB, in New Jersey, a CIM -10 Bomarc nuclear warhead caught fire, scattering weapons grade plutonium. The site was covered with concrete and designated off-limits..

• separate visions: "Other rabbis explain that Adam and Eve were created back to back, joined at their shoulders; then God separated them by a blow with a hatchet or by sawing them in half." (Reik 1973: 26)

• MACE: The MGM-13 Mace was an improved version of the Matador cruise missile. The Mace was equipped with a Goodyear ATRAN (Automatic Terrain Recognition and Navigation) guidance system, and could deliver either a nuclear or high explosive warhead.

• salt: "Here salt, arcane substance (the paradoxical ‘lead of the air’) the white dove (spiritus sapientiae), wisdom and femininity appear in one figure.” (Jung 2003: 245)

• balloons: Albuquerque is host to an annual international hot air balloon festival.

• A new culture snakes its way through stockpiles of mummified nucleardevices drained of their poisons, delivery systems suited to curating soulsand embalming toxic hearts.

• Sanitized of hair, expelled bladder linings, teeth falling out,

• victims burned alive---

• Who is the muse of a museum that exhibits

• Death as Memory in disguise?

• Tall, slim, Urania is the muse of astronomy and the renaissance of poetry

• programmed to travel a self-correcting course; while Kali wears skulls as

• a necklace, earrings of bodies immutably hung, a girdle of severed hands,

• and blood the color of her stunning eyes.

• In a vision of militant technology, BOMARC scars the separate visions we

• have of each other, with a MACE like a Viking’s hatchet, or a spiked ball

• and chain.

• Hidden behind black sunglasses, Urania’s Geiger counter heart is clicking.

• Rockets become pillars of salt; backs unfold wings, buttocks bloat into hot

• air balloons.

Murder by Sacred Well

A detective novel in which the chief detective is kidnapped, another may

have decapitated a teenager, and a third is relying upon dreams, Murder by Sacred Well, explores the collision between personal and collective trauma in an era of climate crisis. The Reborn Celts are certain they can

resurrect the divine powers of nature yet are anxious to conceal the truth of their sacrificial rituals. Are they harmless historians or bloodthirsty murderers? Three eccentric and inexperienced sleuths plunge into the underworlds of insanity and the occult in California, Oxford and

London. After two beheadings, only they can save the crone from having her blood pour into one of the legendary lost rivers of the capital.

Research into form, genre, psychology, history, potency

of mythical narrative, trauma, climate crisis etc.

• Humor in the cozy/traditional mystery

• What is a hero?

• What about those who have been too severely traumatized to recover?

• The traumatized need the gods yet can be possessed by them.

• Accept marginalization or try against the odds?

• From unbearable personal lives to exciting gods and violence creating lust for life.

• What to do with failure?